Harmony Korine, perpetrator of Gummo and Trash Humpers, two of the more extraordinary and controversial American independent films of the last decade or so, has gone straight. Or so he says. Judging, however, by this weird “comedy-drama”, everything is relative.

Two films about how to save the world through personal redemption dominated the weekend at the Venice festival. Each, however, came at us from wildly different angles, as if to say there is no one way to get through the wreckage of life.

When the Prince of Wales - later Edward VIII - fell in love with a married American woman called Wallis Simpson, it provoked one of the deepeyt crises in the history of the monarchy. In 1936, having inherited the throne from his father George V, Edward abdicated, because he was unable to forsake the woman he loved, and equally unable to persuade the Establishment of the day - the Prime Minister, the Archbishop of Canterbury and all - that he could go through the Coronation ceremony having broken the Church's law and married a divorced woman.